In the Library
Niels Lyhne
Jens Peter Jacobson, 1880
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Hanna Astrup Larsen (1919)
- Original
- Original da
- Chapters
- Chapters 14
- Length
- Length 68k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
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And then finally he died the death—the difficult death.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge does the same thing, but as a young poet's diary of dread, written by the writer Niels Lyhne itself converted.
£1.99
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich does the same thing, but compresses the reckoning into one man's final illness instead of a whole disillusioned life.
£1.99
About the book
The light comes off a Danish fjord in the long northern dusk, and a dreaming boy lies in the grass sure his life will be enormous: he will be a poet, and the world is only waiting for him to name it. What happens instead is a life, which is to say a slow accumulation of griefs (a mother, a friend, the women he loves) and a great poem that never gets written. Niels Lyhne is about the one thing this failing, ordinary man refuses to surrender: his conviction that a person must face existence honestly, godless and unconsoled, even when a whispered prayer would make the grief bearable. Jacobsen wrote it in shimmering, sensuous prose that Rilke reread until he could not be without it. Its ending asks whether you can hold to that honesty when the dark comes for you, and love a man who chooses the difficult death over the comforting lie.